Yes! That’s right Bookworm is in Mumbai! I always dreamt of going to Mumbai with my family, and although my parents said that they’ve taken me to Mumbai, I cannot remember. What was really good to witness was that Mumbai really is a sapno ka sheher. Life starts very early in the morning. People don’t waste a second of their precious time.

Anyway, besides seeing wonderful things, Bookworm was thrilled to conduct two full-day workshops in Mumbai. As much as we enjoyed facilitating the sessions, I was also 100 % a participant, who learnt from these workshops.

The first workshop was held in Somaya School. I must say that the school has lovely infrastructure, with an especially well-maintained and well furnished library.

The workshop had participants from different schools under the Somaya Trust, who are working with children’s libraries- this included the teachers and the principal of the Somaya School. The hunger of learning how to make stories more activity-based, and exciting, could clearly be seen. The workshop focused on why children ought to read books, the processes of read-alouds, the different features that make a good book, how to make library-space more dynamic, etc. It was nice to see that all the participant were very engaged throughout and all wanted to learn with full focus.

The second day workshop was held in Powai, in the cafeteria of a corporate office. This workshop had participants coming from different NGOs- who have a keen interest in creating, or running community children’s libraries. The workshop was design keeping community children in mind. So the session was modelled around Bookworm’s Mobile Outreach Program. We commenced our session by making a circle and singing the ‘Make a Circle’ song, an introduction round with actions, a trust walk, then played games and sang a song which was based on the story, a read-aloud of the story, the game ‘Ram Ravan’, the model of a book talk and so on.

Truly, this group was super-active and very engaging. They were very keen to understand how the MOP program works. We could almost see their focus, in their understanding of how to make story-books more lively and interesting, and how to effectively plan sessions.